Each time was because habitable planets were discovered, but unfortunately none were actually inhabited.
Most were just lush wildernesses filled with even more bizarre animal and plant life than that of Kryxo.
But interestingly, on three of the planets, after everything had been consumed, the creature discovered millennia-old ruins of ancient, long-forgotten cities – some far eclipsing even Praxima Prime in size and apparent complexity.
The creature wondered what had happened to these people.
Then it discovered something strange: at similar sites throughout all three planets, separated by millions of parsecs of space, at the ruins of ancient temples, lay the half-broken statues of the apparent exact same gods that groups of Axari and some Praxians had worshipped.
The creature was deeply intrigued and convinced that this new evidence was proof that these so-called gods had actually existed. But who were they and why had they come to these planets… what were they doing there, what happened to them and where were they now? It wondered.
But the silent statues kept their secrets, and the creature was left with plenty of questions but no answers.
Later, its ships left the planets, resumed their search and, flush with renewed energy, the creature returned to its slumber.
For what seemed like forever, it continued dreaming the lives of the Empire and was resting peacefully and content, drifting among the stars, unseen, unchallenged and unthreatened, and free of worries in this blissful dream state.
This went on for what felt like a long, long time.
While it was sleeping, it was subconsciously going through yet another transformation – the integration of the knowledge of the Imperium into its main consciousness was almost complete, and being master of trillions of beings and minds, plus having the ability to assimilate and create almost anything and anyone; as well as the apparent affirmation from the assimilated religious types that it was indeed god; caused it to develop a gigantic, megalomaniac, slightly psychotic, adolescent, godlike personality and godlike self-image.
Then one day, it was rudely yanked out of its dreaming. The Dawn, still in hot pursuit of the Valiant, but gaining ground rapidly, had unexpectedly picked up the residual frequency of the Reactor. It was detected on a habited planet on the route used by the Valiant, which did not stop to investigate.
Further scans revealed some intriguing discoveries – the planet had signs of heavy pollution, but was teeming with life.
It appeared to be ruled by a young, but dominant humanoid species, which had built large cities and had begun a recent small foray into space – it detected its tiny and limited probes and robotics in various locations in the solar system.
Overall, billions of humanoid life forms were detected, but initial analysis revealed the technology of this species to be pre-warp and primitive. However, more detailed scans identified some nuclear weapons and reactors, which contradicted the earlier assumption that this civilization was completely backwards.
But the most bizarre, but very exciting, discovery was the residual frequency of the Reactor. It was faint, indicating recent but limited tests, but it was undoubtedly there.
The creature was awed and perplexed. How could such a primitive civilization, that didn’t even have warp drives, let alone a real presence in space, make such an important technological breakthrough, which the Imperium, with all its sophistication and age had only recently made itself?
And what were the chances of discovering the exact same technology on the other side of the galaxy?
The Dawn hung in space near the planet while the creature was analyzing the scans. It wasn’t long before the civilization tried to make contact, attempting hails on various frequencies, and sending messages and examples of their language.
The creature ignored them, but with passing interest, analyzed the information they had sent and quickly learned their main language, which was called English. They called this place Earth and themselves Humans and had sent very interesting physiological information about their species. The creature wondered how they tasted.
But it wasn’t really interested in all this fuss, and ignored it for the most part, as it set about calculating an approximate location for the Reactor, and began drawing up battle plans. It needed that technology and had to ensure that it would not waste this opportunity by making any mistakes; it kept its bubbling excitement and overconfidence in check; there’d be plenty of time to get excited later, but first things first.
The plan was to distract these humans, by targeting their major cities, in a massive invasion with hundreds of thousands of wisps designed to draw their attention and focus their defense away from its main target, where it would only send a few thousand wisps.
It had to move quickly, lest they discover what it was after and attempted to destroy it; or lest they find a way to somehow hurt the creature itself or defeat it here at this planet. It hoped to get to the technology quickly, assimilate it completely so that it could create replicas back on Praxima as rapidly as possible. That way, the technology would be safe and it would’ve won – regardless of what happened here on Earth.
But just for further insurance, it would create another Dawn replica here to continue pursuit of the Valiant, which it would dispatch just before the attack.
Using the Dawn, it ejected some energy and spawned another Dawn clone, which it sent after the Valiant again. Then, moving as quickly as possible, it spawned fifty fleet vessels at the site of the first Dawn, mostly destroyers and some carriers. It activated their shields and moved them in quickly toward Earth, leaving the Dawn to provide backup – just in case.
It wasn’t long before planetary defense satellites opened fire on the vessels, whose shields then easily deflected the assault. Ground-to-space missiles followed, with the same ineffective results. And like at Praxima, the creature positioned its vessels to strategic locations around the globe, instructed them to descend, switched them into wisp mode, and subdivided these into hundreds of thousands of smaller wisps.
As planned, most of the wisps were positioned over the large cities. Only a few thousand wisps were sent to the target area and other areas as to not appear totally obvious. But unlike what happened at Praxima, as soon as the wisps entered the upper atmosphere, all hell broke loose.
The wisps were assaulted by massive, unrelenting attacks, first by conventional missiles, then nuclear-tipped missiles which, due to their extra strength and unique Earth configuration, with EMP side-effect, knocked out a few hundred thousand wisps, much to the chagrin of the creature, and then further down, more wisps were attacked by fighter jets, missiles and anti-air barrages.
Not liking what the nukes where doing, it spawned a few more fleet vessels from the Dawn, activated their shields which could withstand far worse than nuke attacks, and sent these down to the surface in corporeal form. It spawned more vessels and dispatched these to Earth to replenish the wisp attack.
Overall, the invasion seemed to be going mostly according to plan, with the humans concentrating their defense around the major cities. That’s not to say the minor cities were not heavily defended, just slightly less so. One by one, wisps made planet fall, where they began an indiscriminate process of assimilation, growth and establishing footholds.
But the creature had underestimated the ferocity of these humans, and in some cases, where a blob of light had enveloped most of a city; they were perfectly fine with nuking the city to kill it. That started off as a rare event, with nukes being used sparingly and only as a last resort, after conventional weapons failed.
And as more and more blobs of light started dotting the planet, the humans began to use more and more nukes at tremendous collateral cost to themselves.
Once again, they proved themselves worthy adversaries – they had observed the effects of the nukes and had quickly learned the creature’s weakness: EMPs.
Next, wisp positions were being bombarded with EMP weapons – to devastating effect. The creature beg
an to feel stress.
But like the Imperial fleet, the humans had a finite supply of EMP weapons and couldn’t bomb every square inch of their planet. And as valiant and fierce as their resistance certainly was, they were losing the fight.
They just couldn’t stop the endless rain of wisps and while they were fighting for their cities, their planet was being eaten alive and they were being infiltrated left, right and center.
The creature had already swept across the oceans, wildernesses, farmlands and smaller towns, and was gaining significant strength, ground and advantage. Just like on Praxima, it began to assimilate the population using a variety of creative methods, with a special emphasis on finding and disabling any command and control structures and human leaders.
It wasn’t long before it encountered Mark, his children and Frank and Jo, there on the hilltop.
And as Mark’s knowledge came pouring in, the creature knew instantly that it had finally found what it had been looking for.
It immediately and urgently dispatched creatures to his lab and, finding no resistance there, safely obtained the working prototype of the Reactor.
Chapter 19: Rapture
The situation room was quiet now but it was filled with a cold and sickening sensation of terrible tension and dread, in itself a temporary reprieve from the hectic chaos and intensity that had dominated this room for the last few hours.
Most of the feeds of situation rooms around the world had gone dark, one after the other like cascading dominoes, leading up to the UEDF Command feed only moments ago. The silent flick of the screen as it went black, had felt like the final loud gong of a death knell that reverberated through the room.
The chaotic scene just before the feed cut was still very much fresh: rapidly moving alien creatures attacking surprised officers and military security personnel in violent blurs; the sound of desperate bursts of automatic rifle and small arms fire, and blood curling screams had filled the room. It was over quick.
UEDF HQ was supposed to be hidden and impenetrable; but the aliens had somehow managed to find it and gain access.
Its loss had been a devastating blow.
The admirals and generals all appeared visibly worried, most looked scared shitless. Others were huddled together, having whispered discussions, and a few were still in contact with what remained of their troops, giving out orders like nothing had happened.
The screens that displayed the situation across the world and the state and positions of the world’s militaries, were painting a very stark and terrifying picture.
President Anderson held his head in his hands, hiding his face, creating a temporary private space.
“Oh my God” he whispered to himself.
In an effort to latch onto something normal, he tried to remember random normal things, like his coffee yesterday morning, some of the memorable and fierce overt and covert political battles he’d waged, his recent presidential campaign, the speeches, the interviews, the election victory and other trivial stuff. But the memories provided no solace.
They were fleeting, feeling stupid and empty as they flashed briefly and quickly across his awareness, as if in a hurry to run away. Which was exactly what he felt like doing. Except, run away to where? The world as he knew it on the surface only a few hours ago, simply no longer existed. There was just no place left to run to up there.
That was the harsh reality.
What really struck him though was how quickly things had deteriorated from the historic first contact with an extraterrestrial species, to where humanity was now, only a few hours later, standing on the precipice of complete extinction and losing balance.
It was like the tip of a bulldozer’s claw hitting a termite mound with voracious force, rudely disturbing the false sense of security and superiority within, causing massive damage and casualties, prompting fierce resistance and response, with millions of termites stinging with their mandibles, fighting for their lives, frantically scurrying about in their complex labyrinth of tunnels and throwing everything at their attacker, only to realize later that their sacrifice had been for nothing, their efforts useless, a joke even, that the enemy was infinitely larger and more powerful than anyone could have possibly imagined and completely, hopelessly out of reach.
For all their advanced accomplishments, painstakingly created over the course of countless generations, the termites found out the hard way that they were ultimately at the bottom-end of the cosmic food chain, destined to be squashed, their legacy erased and their nest flattened, their entire colony annihilated to make way for what later turned out to be a giant, cosmic-sized parking lot.
It was a strangely surreal moment when the second vessel came to a stop near Earth; an understated pivotal event that answered many questions that had plagued humanity for thousands of years, in an instant.
There it was, a massive alien vessel, parked right next to Earth – for real. Telescopes and satellites had it in their sights in full HD glory.
Human minds could understand the shape and form: it looked like an advanced alien ship straight out of popular sci-fi shows. It had a sleek, powerful looking, streamlined shape and it was beautiful. The port windows were clearly visible and through a blue-ish tint that surrounded the ship, that some speculated was a shield, creatures could be seen walking inside; not enough detail to clearly make out features, but they had humanoid shapes.
It was a ground-breaking discovery.
For a while it just parked there, not displaying – at least what humans could determine as any aggressive behavior.
Some – the president included – allowed themselves to hope and dream with wide-eyed excitement of an awesome new future; that this was about to be a ‘First Contact’ event with a peaceful alien species. However, not taking any chances, every conceivable earth-to-space weapon the UEDF had was aimed at the vessel.
This included secret space based planetary defense systems; designed to protect humanity from extraterrestrial threats, not so much to protect humanity on humanitarian grounds, but more in terms of insurance, to protect the large financial investments and sources of revenue of the ultra-rich groups and governments, as simply put: losing billions upon billions of humans to a stray asteroid would be seriously bad for business.
On the surface the general population was kept ignorant and in the dark and no-one had yet realized what was happening above in space. A decision was made, and humanity made the first move, and the vessel was hailed. The hail tried to express humanity’s peaceful intent and contained information about the species and data about its primary languages for the aliens to decipher, hopefully enough to establish a dialogue. But curiously, the vessel remained silent.
Then a few hours later, something strange happened: seemingly out-of-thin-air another ship appeared, apparently an exact copy of the original ship; this left the top government scientists scratching their heads – there was no warp bubble, no signs of a theoretical worm-hole, nothing in the data that could explain it. This copy began to move slowly away from Earth, and in a split second it seemed to stretch then flashed away, going into warp in the general direction of the first object that had flown past Earth. Then another different vessel and another materialized.
More vessels continued appearing until there were fifty new alien ships next to the original. The new ships, possibly consisting of a mix of what was thought could be destroyer, frigate and carrier capital class vessels, now moved towards Earth. The UEDF sent several stern warnings, but the ships kept silent. When they finally came too close, the UEDF had no choice but to open fire.
But the incoming ship’s shields simply brushed off everything that was thrown at them, and strangely, they did not return fire. Next, they arrived above the atmosphere unimpeded and spread out and positioned themselves at what appeared to be strategic points around the globe. Everyone panicked; this was dreaded nightmare scenario: invasion. Or was it?
The motivation of the aliens remained elusive. Did humanity just make a fatal mist
ake, essentially signing their own death warrant, by throwing the first blow, by provoking a peaceful alien species because they could not understand them?
And just as everyone thought things couldn’t get any worse or weirder, the vessels inexplicably lost their shape and morphed into what looked like large balls of light. These hung there for a moment, then split into thousands of smaller balls, varying in size; some were the size of small marbles, basketballs, SUVs, others were as large as a three-story house, some were even larger. These then dispersed widely, and began drifting down to the surface. This upped the panic and fear levels to new heights, and was followed by a frantic scramble to initiate full-scale defense.
The world’s air-forces and militaries were mobilized and air-defenses were activated, and shortly afterwards the lights were being hammered high in the upper atmosphere by hundreds of thousands of powerful missiles; which were not able to stop them.
Then, desperately, the missiles were followed by nukes.
Next, thousands of lights that survived the nuclear gauntlet were drifting down from the sky, still out-of-range of city defenses.
Possibly picking up on the flashes of explosions high in the upper atmosphere or the subsequent loud booms, Earth’s unsuspecting public who had until then carried on with their day-to-day lives, oblivious for the most part to the drama up above, finally noticed the floating lights.
The events that followed next happened very quickly. Images and videos of the lights were uploaded to social media, becoming viral in minutes.
Next, the major news networks throughout the world began covering the strange event. What was it? Some sort of meteor shower, or space debris? It wasn’t long before the majority of people noticed how beautifully divine and peaceful the lights appeared.
Then, daringly, some began asking the obvious questions. Could it be the Rapture? Had the Second Coming finally arrived? They had a few moments to ask these questions before complete mayhem broke out.
The Light Page 13